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The Ben-Ami Kadish Spy Case

The arrest of Ben-Ami Kadish on charges of spying for Israel has gotten almost no attention in the blogs I read, nor in the MSM. As the Jerusalem Post notes:

The issue was completely overshadowed in the US news cycle by the Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania.

The story was relegated to the Metro section of The New York Times, to page 19 of The Washington Post and well down the blotter on the evening news programs, the [Israeli] official said with some satisfaction.

Today, the LA Times’ Babylon and Beyond blogger picked up the story, commenting:

Accused spy Ben-ami Kadish, an 84-year-old retired Army engineer, reportedly had the same handler as [convicted Israeli spy Jonathan] Pollard, an allegation which revives longstanding speculation that Pollard was just part of extensive and ongoing Israeli network in America.

"This was a much larger espionage operation with sleeper cells in the United States than we understood or could have known at the time," said Joseph E. DiGenova, the former U.S. attorney who helped prosecute Pollard.

The implications of this latest scandal are still murky. Shmuel Rosner, Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, calls it "a public relations disaster," but also notes that both the accused and his crimes are very, very old. Still the potential, Rosner writes, is disturbing:

The FBI always suspected that Pollard was one of many, and has now been proven right. This will give legitimacy to future suspicions.

Critics of Israel and numerous intelligence professionals have long maintained that Pollard was the tip of the iceberg. For many out there, the infamous tale of the Israeli art student spy ring remains one of the criminally under-explored stories of recent years.

According to press reports, the Israeli government is claiming that this is old news:

Israel on Wednesday assured the United States that it had not spied on its key ally since 1985, after the arrest in New York of an US Army veteran charged with passing defence secrets to the Jewish state nearly 30 years ago.

“The events go back to the early 1980s. Since 1985 there have been clear orders from (Israel’s) prime ministers not to conduct these kind of activities,” foreign ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said.

Israel has no spies in the US. Just like it has no nuclear weapons, I suppose.

Back in 2004, Time reported:

Last week the Washington Post revealed that the National Security Agency’s electronic snoopers, which had been listening in on the phone conversation of an Israeli intelligence officer, uncovered tantalizing evidence that Israel may have a mole even better placed than Pollard was: a senior U.S. official code-named “Mega” who may be passing on U.S. diplomatic intelligence. ...

The FBI, which is investigating the Mega case, has grumbled privately that Israeli espionage agents routinely prowl California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 corridor for high-tech secrets. “The Israelis were bumping into very nearly every one of our friends and allies doing the same thing,” says a former FBI counterintelligence agent. In a report last year to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA identified Israel as one of six foreign countries with “a government-directed or -orchestrated clandestine effort to collect U.S. economic secrets.” Senior intelligence officials tell TIME that last year U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk complained privately to the Israeli government about heavy-handed surveillance by Israeli intelligence agents, who had been following American-embassy employees in Tel Aviv and searching the hotel rooms of visiting U.S. officials.

The notion that the Israelis don’t spy on the USA is absurd. Of course they do. Just as we spy on them.

The key thing to remember here is that nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests. Some Israeli commentators clearly understand this, focusing their attention on the question of why this case was brought at this precise point in time:

More likely, Kadish is being used by American officials as a means to loosen support for Israel as the two countries enter a tenacious period of negotiations. This is a pattern of American pressure that repeats itself. The tactic is geared to embarrass American supporters of Israel, particularly Members of Congress, who oppose weapons sales to Israel’s foes, dangerous concessions to the Palestinians, or the abrogation of previous commitments to Israel.

During the last 30 years, particularly, in times of tension, American officials claimed that Israel stole plans for the Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, diverted nuclear material from a U.S. plant in the 1960s, illegally obtained krytron triggers for nuclear weapons, pilfered computer components from Patriot missiles, and used American technology on the Lavie aircraft that was later transferred to China. The 2005 arrest of two AIPAC staffers is more of the same, and they were charged under the creaky 1917 Espionage Act statute older than Kadish. For years, unnamed American spy-hunters have been looking for an accomplice to Jonathan Pollard. Leaks on these stories almost always took place on the eve of some contretemps with the U.S. State Department.

Today’s case against 84-year-old Kadish reflects more the impatience of the U.S. Secretary of State with Israel’s decision to continue building in Jerusalem and in settlement blocs and to retain security roadblocks.

Israel is a sovereign nation with its own interests, which it is perfectly entitled to defend, but so is the United States. We Americans have to view the relationship realistically rather than romatically. Unfortunately, as illustrated by the disatrous global fallout from Hillary Clinton’s pledge to obliterate Iran if it attacked Israel, realism often gives way to other considerations.